The Children of Freetown

A Staten Island man thought he knew an easy way to help the victims of a distant civil war.

Every day, Americans are confronted with news of horrors throughout the world which seem both vividly intimate and impossibly distant; helpless outrage is a characteristic emotion of the global age. On an October afternoon three years ago, a New Yorker named Matthew Mirones was glancing through the Times' Week in Review section when he came upon a photo essay on war amputees in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, on the West African coast. A boy, his right arm gone to the shoulder, was being bathed by his mother. A man, missing both hands, was trying to write his name with the hook of an artificial arm. A teen-age girl, also a double amputee, was lying at the water's edge with her stumps glistening in the surf. Mirones, who had never heard of this war—and had barely heard of Sierra Leone—felt the hair on his arms stand up.

Amputation has been the signature atrocity of Sierra Leone's civil war, which went on for eleven years and ended last January. The most credible estimates of the number of war amputees which I heard ranged from two thousand to four thousand, with perhaps twice that many dead from their wounds. (The Western press usually puts the number of war amputees at twenty thousand.) Whatever the number, reports and photographs of civilians—many of them children—missing ears, lips, legs, and hands finally drew international attention to the long-neglected war and played a role in bringing it to an end.

As Mirones read, he felt acute shame, and a rising excitement. Mirones is a prosthetist—he makes artificial limbs. “I said, 'This is my profession, and I'm not aware of this—that people are being disfigured?' ” he told me recently. “Before I even finished the article, in my mind I said, 'I've got to try to do something here. I mean, I know I could help these people.' “

Mirones, a small man with a highly mobile face dominated by a black mustache, is a forty-six-year-old bachelor. Though he now lives on Staten Island, his speech and manner remain in Brooklyn, the borough where he was born, grew up, and has his main office, on a lively, seedy downtown street, next to a wig shop advertising “100% Human Hair.”

Mirones's grandfather was a village cobbler on the Greek island of Chios. Mirones's father, Aristotle, immigrated to Brooklyn after the Second World War and set up a small prosthetics company called Arimed, below the apartment on Atlantic Avenue where Mirones spent his early years, three blocks from the firm's current headquarters. Mirones grew up in the business; by the age of seven, he was making deliveries around downtown Brooklyn, holding shopping bags at shoulder level to keep them from dragging on the pavement. When older kids surrounded him and tried to steal the leg braces and shoe inserts, he would talk his way out of trouble in the quick, ingratiating, street-smart manner that he still uses.

When Mirones speaks of his patients, a nervous physical empathy takes over, and his face and body get involved in the exaggerated way of a mime: his eyes narrow in pain, his mouth stretches out and down, his torso collapses against the desk as his whole arm up to the shoulder is pulled into a recycling machine; his ankle buckles and he slips into the jolting hobble of a diabetic who has lost sensation in his feet.

Mirones trained at New York University, and is an American board-certified prosthetist, a qualification that enabled him to greatly expand Arimed's operations and increase its sophistication. Yet he still can't help using the word “stump.” “We call it a residual, not a stump,” he corrects himself, for my benefit, but a minute later he uses the word again. “This is Mr. Montoya,” he says, picking up the plaster model of a stump lying on a worktable in Arimed's second-floor lab. (Mr. Montoya's lower right leg was shot off by narcotics traffickers in the Medellín, Colombia, airport.) The lab looks like the studio of a sculptor in the grip of a macabre vision of the lower extremities.

It was not as a professional humanitarian with global ideas but as a small businessman, an outer-borough Republican, and a craftsman that Mirones decided to involve himself in an African calamity. His purpose, he said, was “to integrate the concept of life with disability over there, so that people will be more willing to accept their disability and work with what they have and use the devices to be self-sufficient.” He decided that he would bring a small group of child amputees to New York, fit them with prostheses, train the children in using them, and then send them home to be “beacons of hope” to a desperate population.

Mirones approached several large nongovernmental organizations, or N.G.O.s, such as the Red Cross, but found them unhelpful. “Everyone had to go through committee, and 'We'll bring it up at our annual or semi-annual or next quarter's meeting,' ” he said. It affronted his can-do business sense and his idea of self-reliance. “I just felt that the more focussed I stayed, the leaner and cleaner I stayed, the fewer people involved, I probably could be more effective.”

But, if he was going to bring a group of Sierra Leonean amputees to New York, Mirones would need help, and he looked for it in his own community. Staten Island University Hospital agreed to give free surgery and medical care. Local Rotary Clubs, led by a printshop owner named Joe Mandarino, agreed to organize food, housing, and transportation. The story of mutilated children seemed to render any objections moot. And as long as the children remained an abstraction, everyone who signed on to Mirones's idea wanted the same thing: to help.

Sierra Leone's civil war began in 1991, when a cashiered Army corporal and itinerant photographer named Foday Sankoh brought a group of a hundred fighters, called the Revolutionary United Front, across the Liberian border and into the eastern jungles. The men had been trained in Libya, and the rebellion was backed by Charles Taylor, who was fighting his own war in Liberia. (He was elected President in 1997.) Sierra Leone's diamond mines fuelled the R.U.F.'s operations—stones were smuggled out through Liberia, and weapons, mostly small arms, entered the same way—and the rebellion early on lost any claim to a purpose higher than organized crime.

Yet a number of people in Sierra Leone told me that they had initially welcomed the news of a rebellion. “All of us, we were waiting for this spark,” Dennis Bright, a professor of French who works with street boys in Freetown, said. Three decades after independence from the British, the regime in power was hopelessly corrupt and utterly indifferent to the despair of a generation of young people without prospects. The élite in Freetown sent their children out of the country; the economy was controlled, almost entirely off the books, by an alliance of Western companies, Lebanese middlemen, and venal officials. “I describe this thing that has happened to us as a new kind of war,” Bright said. It transcended any ethnic or religious basis; it had no coherent ideology; it was largely a war of children and youth. “Somebody comes with some political thing and says the thing is ready to happen,” Bright went on. “But, when it starts, the venom itself surpasses whatever political thing might have sparked it. This is why the vandalism, the unbridled terror, are just expressions of people being left out. This is the injustice of the war. The perpetrators can get only those they can reach. The poor people are doubly victims.”

When the R.U.F. began brutally targeting civilians, the rebellion lost whatever chance of support it might have had among most Sierra Leoneans and the outside world. In 1996, in an election that was the freest in the country's history, a United Nations official named Ahmad Tejan Kabbah became President. His slogan, “The future is in your hands,” prompted the first rash of amputations by the R.U.F., who told their victims to ask the President for new hands. But the majority of the war's atrocities took place in two campaigns of terror. The first, in early 1998, followed a coup that temporarily overthrew Kabbah and replaced him with an alliance between elements of the armed forces and the R.U.F., who increasingly had come to resemble each other. (It's a common mistake to attribute all the war's atrocities against civilians to the rebels; many of the worst were committed by the Sierra Leone Army.) When Nigerian-led peacekeeping troops drove the junta out of Freetown, in February, 1998, and restored the ineffectual Kabbah, soldiers and rebels in the north and east went on a rampage. It was called Operation Pay Yourself. Whatever the men with guns could get, they were entitled to keep.

Muctar Jalloh, a man in his early twenties, had come to the town of Koidu, in the east, to dig for diamonds with his uncle. Jalloh had been a student in the north, but his family needed money and he had to leave high school and try to earn a living in the dangerous diamond business. When Operation Pay Yourself hit the region, he, his uncle, his uncle's wife, and their two children fled into the bush. There they stayed for two months, foraging for food, hiding from rebels who sometimes passed within twenty feet of them. The children's legs swelled for lack of salt. Jalloh had been a Boy Scout, and he used his compass, water bottle, and knife to help the group survive, but eventually he got rid of his kit for fear of being caught and suspected of being a soldier. In a notebook, he recorded each day's activities: went east, southeast, searched for food, saw rebels and dashed. He called what he was writing “Struggle in the Bush.”

Then Jalloh and his family heard that Nigerian troops had recaptured Koidu. On the morning of April 19th, they decided to risk going home, but on the road they fell into a trap. About thirty rebel soldiers, mostly teen-agers, were hiding behind trees. They burned Jalloh's possessions: his Scout I.D., his school jacket, trousers, and tie, a paperback novel he'd taken from an abandoned village while searching for food, and “Struggle in the Bush.” Then they hogtied him on a stick suspended between a tree and a rock. All afternoon, the rebels brought in more civilian prisoners. Jalloh watched as, one after another, six men were beheaded in front of him. He was told that he would be the seventh.

“I knew I'm going there,” Jalloh recalled. “The way he was, I will be here soon.” Jalloh thought about his mother and how he would die before he could help her. A Muslim, he prayed, “Oh, God, if this is the way, forgive my sins. Lord, this is the way you destined for my death. O.K., I thank you for that.”

At some point, the commander, whose nom de guerre was Savage, sent a soldier off in the direction of a noise, with orders to bring back human hearts. The soldier returned with a sack of them, and others cooked and ate them. Jalloh found himself “trying to die.”

Five hours later, the rebels untied Jalloh and took him to a felled mango tree. When he realized that they intended to cut off his hand, Jalloh laid his left arm on the tree and begged, “Please cut my left hand. I'm a student. My right hand is my future.” A rebel hit his left hand with the back of a machete, and said, “This is not the hand I want. If you fail to put your right hand, I'm going to kill you.” Jalloh was struck in the head with a gun butt and a machete. The rebels ordered his uncle to hold down Jalloh's right arm. Jalloh told his uncle that he wasn't to blame.

A sharp machete delivered the first hard blow. Jalloh got to his feet, thinking it was over, but his hand was still partially attached a few inches above the wrist. Rebels held his arm against a tree and began hacking, but now they were using a duller machete, and it required many blows to cut through the bone. Commander Savage fired a shot at the uncle's right hand and had it severed. Machetes hacked at Jalloh's thigh and shoulder, and then someone cut off his right ear. He lost consciousness.

When he came to, the rest of the family had scattered. (A year later, Jalloh learned that his uncle had managed to run off, but his wife and their two children had been abducted by the rebels. The wife became the possession of a young rebel; the four-year-old boy was conscripted as a porter; and the baby, when he wouldn't stop crying, was thrown into a latrine and died.) Jalloh staggered a few feet, until shooting started, and then he hid under a tree (“which the Lord used for my safety”) as bullets showered around him. Darkness was falling, and it had begun to rain. “The rebels stayed awhile and went away, and I managed to walk and stay in a broken house,” he recalled. There he spent a painful, sleepless night.

The next day, still bleeding, he walked five miles and finally met Nigerian troops, who bound his wounds. Two weeks later, his stump swollen and infested with maggots, he and a number of other wounded people were taken by armed convoy to Freetown for surgery, and were placed in refugee camps around the city. Jalloh was in despair. He told me, “I know what my hand did for me whenever I think of my writing, because I love writing. I love to take pen and write whatever I want, just write, write, write.” He thought that no one would ever love him or want to marry him. “I was thinking how I was before and I shall never be that way again.”

Then a group of amputees with no hands at all arrived at the camp. “I have my hand,” he realized. “I saw that I'm better than that. It was after a year and a month that I finally accepted myself as I am.”

The double amputees were victims of the second wave of terror, called Operation No Living Thing. It peaked on January 6, 1999, with a surprise attack on Freetown by rebel infiltrators and remnants of the Army who called themselves the West Side Boys, because it made them sound like American gangsters. Thousands in the city were killed, and hundreds more were mutilated. Only a fierce counterattack by Nigerian-led troops kept the capital from falling to the rebels, but as the rebels retreated east they laid waste to miles of Freetown's poor, densely populated neighborhoods and suburbs. The violence was extraordinarily cruel and personal. Victims were raped, dismembered, or burned alive while the rebels taunted them; family members were forced to watch, and even to perform atrocities; boy conscripts returned to their old neighborhoods to settle scores. Commanders with names like Captain 2 Hands and Betty Cut Hands organized special amputation squads in neighborhoods from which the rebels were retreating. The grounds of Kissy Mental Hospital, where patients are chained to concrete floors, became a central mutilating zone.

A squad of nine rebels abducted a thirteen-year-old girl named Mariama Conteh, who was living with relatives, and five other teen-agers. The girls were taken to the mental hospital and gang-raped, then were made to lie face down with their arms on some stones used for cooking. Mariama's left hand was nearly severed by an axe; the back of her right wrist sustained a deep cut, but she got up and ran away before the rebels could finish. She fell and broke her leg, got up and ran again, passed out, came to, and kept running till she reached home. Her aunt had fled. She asked her uncle for water; he said he couldn't help her and ran off with his grandchildren into the bush. Alone, naked, her left hand attached by nothing but flesh, Mariama went out again and finally found her aunt, who with a broken bottle completed the amputation of Mariama's left hand. For two days, Mariama hid among trees and in unfinished houses, her wounds untreated, and eventually got to a local hospital, but a doctor told her that rebels were lying in wait to amputate the other hand of people who came in with one hand still attached. Three days after the attack, Nigerian troops found her and took her to the city's main hospital. Her right hand was saved, but she had a bone infection in her leg for which she couldn't afford antibiotics. Mariama ended up with hundreds of others in a camp for amputees and war wounded run by Doctors Without Borders, in the western part of Freetown.

An American named Corinne Dufka lived around the corner from the camp. Dufka is the Human Rights Watch representative in Sierra Leone, and over the past four years she has meticulously recorded the atrocities. “Believe me, it's the thing of the future, this kind of rebellion,” she told me. “Because of the frustrated youth—millions of frustrated youth sitting in slum areas looking at their role models doing nothing but stealing from them and exploiting them. It's all about survival. In conversations here, food is so important.” Parents know that a certain number of their children will die—unless they can get what Dufka calls an “edge.” She said, “A big part of life in Africa is getting an edge. For some, it's the military. For others, it's the R.U.F. And for others it's a foreigner.”

Through the office of his congressman, Vito Fossella, Mirones was put in touch with an advocacy group called the Friends of Sierra Leone, made up of former Peace Corps volunteers and Sierra Leoneans living in the United States. He talked to a Sierra Leonean émigrée named Etta Touré, a tall, soft-spoken woman who works for a defense contractor in Arlington, Virginia. When I met her at the company's offices, she told me that the town where she grew up, in the north of Sierra Leone, had ceased to exist.

Of all the atrocities, Touré said, amputation was the worst. “The visual evidence that we have is going to be around us forever,” she said. “The dead—after a while you forget, unless it's your own family. But this is something that's going to be permanent in our history, especially the children who will grow up and be like that always.” Touré and the Friends of Sierra Leone had spent years trying to track down people uprooted by the war, and to get the attention of the United States government—without much success. In her company's photocopying room, a sign was posted to remind employees about the need for security. It said, “Countries Don't Have Friends—They Have Interests!” Every time she saw it, Touré thought about her country of birth. “It translates, 'Sierra Leone is not of interest,' ” she said.

Mirones and Touré found what they were looking for in each other. Touré agreed with Mirones: they would approach the problem directly instead of trying to work through indifferent governments or sluggish international organizations. They wouldn't deal with the N.G.O.s in Sierra Leone. Touré asked a cousin in Freetown, who sometimes visited the amputee camp with money or toys, to take snapshots of amputees with their stumps clearly visible. In the summer of 2000, a Federal Express envelope containing about twenty-five photographs arrived at the Arimed office.

Mirones waited until he was alone, at the end of the day, to look at the photographs. “I wanted maybe just to dwell on it, and enjoy the moment of having them actually in my hand—the actual people in my hand that I could help,” he said.

It is a shock to see small bodies so damaged and deformed—an arm ending too soon in a scarred and ingrown fold of skin, a thigh sewn closed like a drawstring pouch. Most of the children stand against the background of a plastic sheet, dirty white with blue horizontal stripes—the international building material of refugee camps. Soaked in sunlight, they present themselves for view: an arm extended, a leg held up. There are no smiles, except for one girl who manages to turn up the ends of her mouth as she leans on a wooden crutch and displays her left thigh with her right hand: Bintu Amara, age eight. (The names and ages are written on the back of the photographs.) The children's eyes are flat, without expectation. They know why they're posing, what needs to be seen.

In each photograph, Mirones was looking at the length of the residual limb. The longer the limb, the better the outcome. The rebels were said to ask certain victims whether they wanted “short sleeve” or “long sleeve,” meaning above or below the elbow. For prosthetic purposes, long sleeve was best. Mirones wanted a mixture of legs and arms, bilateral amputees as well as unilateral, boys and girls. Above all, he wanted children. “This may sound a little coarse, but I think that, to make it more compelling and more sensitive to the average person, seeing a child who's been hurt in such a way is much more powerful than an adult,” he told me. It didn't take him long to make his choices. “It was pretty obvious who was going to be a good prosthetic candidate.”

Mirones's original list included six girls ranging in age from eight to sixteen, including Mariama Conteh, and one four-year-old boy who didn't live at the camp but happened to be there on the day the photographs were taken. Etta Touré insisted that a four-year-old girl named Memunatu be included. Mirones had wanted to leave her out; her amputation was well above the elbow. But Memuna, as she is called, had become the poster child for the amputees: her picture had once hung at the United Nations. Sierra Leone's President Kabbah took her to Lomé, Togo, for the July, 1999, signing of the peace accord that gave the rebels a share of power. (Within a year, the R.U.F. had broken the accord.) At the ceremony, Foday Sankoh apologized for Memuna's suffering. But upon returning home from Lomé the President deposited her back in the amputee camp. Etta Touré believed that the little girl deserved medical care in the United States. So Memuna was added to the list.

Two bilateral amputees whom Mirones had selected, teen-age girls, had gone to Guinea, acting on a rumor that amputees were receiving visas to the United States there (the rumor proved false); and so they missed their chance. But Mirones wanted at least one upper-extremity bilateral—by far the most disabling amputation—and at the last minute a forty-seven-year-old man named Tommy Foday, who had been a driver for the ruling party until he lost both hands, was added to the list, along with Muctar Jalloh, whose English made him a likely spokesman for the group.

On September 21, 2000, almost a year after Mirones first learned of the devastation in Sierra Leone, two adult and six child amputees, along with two women acting as chaperons, arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport. The Washington Post and television news reporters covered the event. The next day, at a welcoming ceremony in an African church outside Washington, Mirones got his first look at his new patients. At one point, they were called to the front to sing Sierra Leone's national anthem in Krio, the country's lingua franca. They sang seated, but Tommy Foday eventually stood up and began to weep. He was wearing tinted glasses, and someone took them off to wipe his eyes.

The group testified before the House Subcommittee on Africa. Upon arrival in New York, they met the City Council and received a proclamation of welcome. They were taken to Staten Island, where Joe Mandarino and the Rotary Club arranged housing for them, eventually setting them up in a condominium near Staten Island University Hospital. Finally, a week after landing in the United States, the amputees arrived at Arimed's Brooklyn office. There Mirones and his staff put all other work on hold and began to make plaster casts of their stumps and fit them with prostheses.

The Sierra Leoneans were model patients. Two four-year-olds required revision surgery, because their bones were pencilling—growing conically through the skin in sharp, painful points. Mariama, who had lost one hand and nearly lost the other, was so weakened by the bone infection that she might have died had she remained in the camp; she was put on a regimen of antibiotics. There were respiratory infections, evidence of exposure to tuberculosis and hepatitis, malnutrition, gynecological complications as a result of rape. And, of course, the patients needed to learn to use their new arms and legs. Mohammed, the four-year-old boy, whose left leg had been blown off just below the knee by bomb fragments and whose right leg had been rendered useless, was fitted with a limb and a brace and immediately began to walk, with the unbridled delight of a child who'd been crawling almost all his life. When he had arrived, he was nearly mute; walking made him garrulous. The girls, morbidly shy at first, put on the new devices and dedicated themselves to rehabilitation therapy. Dr. Jeffrey Weinberg, the chairman of rehabilitation medicine at Staten Island University Hospital, said, “After they were given prosthetics, they became totally different children.”

Sierra Leoneans seldom say, “My hand was amputated.” They say, “I was amputated.” Erik Duret, a French psychologist treating amputees in Freetown, told me that when he sees his patients they continue to show him the stump. “Sometimes it's so present, so painful, that they are no longer anything but that,” he said. “The amputated part takes the place of the whole.” A stump moves as if of its own will, like something blind and mute that has attached itself to the body. The arm has lost its face and voice; especially in the case of a double amputee, it's as if he had been gagged as well as bound. When I first met the Sierra Leoneans, I kept imagining that the tongue had been cut off along with the hands.

“Think about it,” Mirones told me, “the implications for your manhood. Not only can't you care for yourself—you can't touch a woman, your children. Christ, you can't even urinate. It's like castration.”

Duret said, “The patient has to mourn this perfect body, to be able to admit afterward that, effectively, 'My body is no longer what it was, but, thanks to the prosthesis, I can do this, do that.' “

One afternoon while I was sitting in an Arimed examination room, I saw Tommy Foday, the driver who had lost both hands, take off his sweatshirt so that his prostheses could be adjusted. In five minutes of intense muscular activity, he dropped his torso as low as it would go, gripped the fabric behind his neck with his hooks, and, after several tries, pulled the sweatshirt over his head.

The Arimed prosthesis has a hard, laminated acrylic-resin socket that conforms to every contour of the stump for the greatest muscular control. It's connected to a steel double hook, or terminal device, on one end, and a nylon harness fits over the shoulders; a cable runs from the harness to the terminal device, and the wearer controls the hook by hunching the shoulders. The first thing Foday had done when he received his prostheses was to go into the bathroom, unzip his fly without assistance, and urinate.

In the lobby on the way out, Foday tried to put on his sunglasses. He had the bridge in the pincer grip of his hook, but the balance was off; the glasses were askew on his face, and one of the hinges kept flopping. Finally, on the fifth or sixth try, he got them on straight.

Three months after the children arrived, Mirones's project began falling apart. The heart of the matter was this: What should become of the children? Mirones planned to send them back home after rehabilitation, to show Sierra Leone's other amputees that they could still lead independent lives. He had built room for growth into the prostheses and would send duplicate parts as needed, training one of the adults in maintenance. He would travel there at some unspecified time to expand his work—what he called Stage Two. But for the others involved in the project—especially Joe Mandarino and the Rotarians—it all sounded vague and impractical. Would the children be safe? Would their limbs be stolen? Would they really get the intensive follow-up care that prostheses—especially for children, who have to be refitted every eighteen months or so—require? Would they vanish back into the misery of Sierra Leone?

The amputees wanted to stay. Whenever the children misbehaved, the surest way to get them in line was to say that they'd be sent back to Freetown. Almost all the children had at least one living parent in Sierra Leone, but their parents were subsisting on rations in the amputee camp. The war seemed to be ending, but it had seemed that way before. One of the chaperons told me that the children seldom spoke of missing their parents. When I asked why, she answered, “Here they get everything they need, but there, even if they have parents, if they have no money the father gets angry, the mother gets angry. It's poverty.” But they were not in the United States as asylum seekers; they had six-month humanitarian visas, renewable for up to two years. Promises had been made to both governments that the children would return home.

Something else was happening on Staten Island: a group of people in the tight community of the North Shore was falling in love with the children. Someone had to drive them to Our Lady Help of Christians School, where they were enrolled; someone had to give them phone cards so they could call Freetown. Nancy Passeri, a middle-aged woman with close-cropped hair who is the wife of Staten Island University Hospital's president, acted as a chauffeur on one occasion, and before long she was spending almost every free hour with the children, taking little Mohammed to have the stitches removed from his amputated leg and holding the boy in her arms as he broke into a sweat and screamed and kicked and pleaded, “Auntie Nancy!”

One day, as Passeri and I were driving to the small condominium where the group was housed, she said, “I'm not very into organized religion, but these kids are so profoundly—well, you've met them, you know. I have to believe there's more. They've made me more spiritual.” She kept asking herself, “Is this a service or a disservice? How can they be sent back? How is this ever going to work? You show them hope and then you put them back, you show them Heaven and then you take them back to Hell.” She concluded that, without losing their connection to home, the children should stay and be adopted. “I would like to go and meet the families,” she said. “If I could sit with them and translate with them, and they could feel the love I have for their children, they wouldn't be so afraid.”

Joe Mandarino, whom the children call Uncle Joe, is a combative man with salt-and-pepper hair and heavy black eyebrows over fatigued eyes. As I entered the cramped second-floor offices of his printing company one afternoon, he greeted me by saying, “I'm a negative person,” and he began to assess Mirones's project. “Had it not been for Matthew, these kids would never have come here—that's the good side,” he said. But Mirones had no follow-up plan for the children's return. “I'm Italian—when I feel someone's playing a game, I don't play along. He said, 'I feel the international community will get involved. It will blossom like a flower.' I said, 'Are you crazy? Just giving them a limb isn't enough. You have to give them yourself.' What he hasn't given is himself. His heart's not in it.” Mandarino never intended to do more than arrange the children's housing. “But there's a beauty about the people of Sierra Leone that attracts you and catches you like a web. A beauty and a purity and an unconditional love. It's like Adam and Eve. It's like going back in time where the races don't matter. They hug you, they kiss you.” He smiled. “If you ever feel a little down on yourself—market's not doing well, your business isn't good—you walk to their house and you feel like a million dollars.”

In December, 2000, Mandarino called a meeting on Staten Island between the Rotarians and the Friends of Sierra Leone. “We're going to give them all the advantages in America,” Mandarino said. Etta Touré, who had come up from Washington, and the former Peace Corps volunteers countered that separating the children from their families and their culture would only deepen rifts caused by the war. “If you want to send them back,” Mandarino told Touré, “take them now, back to D.C. with you. We're done with them.” Instead, the Friends of Sierra Leone relented and turned the children's passports over to the Rotarians. Mandarino began applications for political asylum; at the same time, he and Nancy Passeri started looking for families to adopt the children. Mirones's original idea of inspiring large numbers of amputees in Sierra Leone gave way to saving the handful who were here.

“We're looking at the little picture,” Mandarino said. “We're concerned not with the country but with a few people. Countries look at big issues that affect their national interest. That's why Sierra Leone never had an impact in this country. They could kill each other from here to eternity and we won't care. Unless a journalist writes a story—then we get angry. For a little while, we have a focus. But now we can't shut it off.”

The rush to adoption struck some of the former Peace Corps volunteers as well-meaning American arrogance. Lynne Loomis-Price, who served in a village that has since been obliterated by the war, has daughters the same age as two of the children. “How can you amputate a girl from her mother?” she said. ” 'Do you want her to stay or not?' But what a rotten question to put to a woman who's already lost everything. 'We can raise your kids better than you, don't worry.' ” No one involved in bringing the amputees from Sierra Leone had thought it through, she said. But LoomisPrice had no solution of her own. She concluded that the children shouldn't be sent back against their will. She said, “I don't know the happy ending here.”

In order to strengthen the plea for asylum, the immigration lawyer who took down the children's stories tried to find cause for the cruelty in politics or in ethnicity or in religion. But the violence that the amputees had endured was both meaningless and indelible: the children of Sierra Leone had suffered for no reason at all. Such senselessness evoked a frenzy of emotion and action in the people of Staten Island: they arranged outings, held fund-raisers, and threw a sweet-sixteen party for Mariama, at the Staten Island Hotel with a hundred guests.

The children were being treated by a trauma specialist named Louise Abitbol, and when I went to see her at a child-advocacy center, near the ferry terminal, she described the Staten Islanders' response to the children with the phrase “vicarious trauma.” She said, “They've created their own little war zone.” With the disputes over immigration and adoption, she continued, “They've taken on all the behaviors of these people.” It was disrespectful to disregard the parents in Africa, she said—”very presumptuous to think that they're just going to give up their children.” Abitbol credited the Staten Islanders for their devotion but said, “They're in over their heads, as far as I'm concerned. Culturally and politically.”

One day at the advocacy center, Abitbol and Passeri were talking to the children about adoption. Each of the kids made up a “wish list” of what would be desirable in adoptive parents. But gradually the children became tense. Fatu, a ten-year-old, muttered, “No more Krio, only English,” and in frustration she took a Magic Marker in her prosthetic hand and drew a line through the word “parents.” The others did the same. Abitbol substituted “friends” for “parents.” Bintu, nine, said, “I feel angry.” Damba, eight, said, “I feel sad.” In Passeri's car on the way home, the children were uncharacteristically silent. For days, the two women couldn't agree on what had happened. Passeri, who sees the children's future here, thought that they didn't like the word “friends,” that they wanted those who adopted them to be “parents”; Abitbol, concerned about cultural sensitivity, thought the opposite. It turned out that the children were angry at Passeri: they had believed that she would adopt them and they would live in her house, and now they realized it wasn't to be.

It was hard to know the truth about the children's inner lives. Their backgrounds and stories were unclear; no one seemed to know whether Bintu's mother was alive, or exactly what had happened to Memuna and Mohammed. “What saved them was the ability to dissociate, to move outside their bodies,” Abitbol said. “You see it on their faces, with this blank stare—nobody home.”

The condominium where the Sierra Leoneans were living was a drab two-story affair, strewn with schoolbooks. The chaperons and the children lived downstairs, the two men—Muctar Jalloh and Tommy Foday—upstairs. One evening, as West African music played in the upstairs living room and the girls danced across the carpet, Damba talked about her mother, whose left hand had been cut off at the same time as her own. Damba was six when it happened, and in the hospital she asked her mother if her hand would grow back. Even now, Damba said, when she dreams about her mother they both have two hands. “When I wake up I didn't know if I have a hand,” she said. “I look to see. But I didn't have my hand.” The others chimed in, laughing. Bintu, who lost her leg to a gunshot, dreams of walking freely, and Mariama sees herself cooking and carrying water.

It was the hour for Muslim prayers. Upstairs, Jalloh and Foday laid out a towel in the corner of the room, where they were joined by a fifteen-year-old orphan named Sheku. When Sheku was eleven, his father was burned alive and his mother shot dead before his eyes; then rebels cut off both his hands. He was a late addition to the group: he had originally come over with four men, all double amputees, sponsored by a shopping-mall developer who'd read another Times article about amputation. But after receiving prostheses from Mirones the five were sent back to the amputee camp in Freetown. When Nancy Passeri, who fantasizes about whole families immigrating from the camp, learned that a minor had been in the group, she bought Sheku a return ticket. Now, back in this country for the second time, he was getting ready to say his evening prayers on Staten Island.

Jalloh knelt in front, Foday and Sheku behind, facing east. They had taken off their prostheses. Jalloh had learned the Arabic verses in Koranic school, and he recited them in a glottal chant. He brought his left hand to his lips, passed it over his face, and raised it to Heaven; Foday and Sheku were solemn. The refrigerator in the kitchen was humming, and the men rocked and prayed: “All praise and thanks are to Allah, the Lord of Mankind and all that exists. The most gracious, the most merciful, the only Owner and the only ruling judge of the day of Recompense. You alone we worship, and you alone we ask for help in everything.”

Downstairs, the girls were watching a Nigerian video. It was a love story, and they were riveted. When it was over, Damba got up, went to a full-length mirror in the corner of the room, and stared at herself.

No one seemed to know what the children's parents wanted, and I decided to go to Sierra Leone to find out. My travelling companion was Matthew Mirones. He and the Rotarians were no longer speaking. His involvement with the children had waned. They were now just patients coming in every few weeks for follow-up care—with a frequency that made me wonder how his original plan of returning them to Africa could ever have worked. Bringing the children to New York had transformed their lives, but not in the way Mirones had imagined. His project had been wrested away from him, and now he seemed determined to show that he was serious about wanting to help more than just eight people.

Mirones had never been to Africa, let alone to a ruined country like Sierra Leone, which a United Nations' survey of human development had rated the worst place in the world. A ceasefire was holding, and the U.N. had seventeen thousand peacekeepers in the tiny country to oversee disarmament, but Mirones wondered if some rebel would say, “Oh, this is the wise guy who's going to help our people?” He didn't want to come back requiring his own company's services. Two nights before we were to leave New York, he telephoned me, and I thought he was going to back out. But he had just heard that there were Lebanese restaurants in Freetown. “I grew up with these guys on Atlantic Avenue,” he said. “We'll have good food!”

Between long ocean beaches and a chain of lovely green hills, Freetown lay in a state of collapse. In African terms, it's an old city, settled at the end of the eighteenth century by freed slaves, and among its more extravagantly decayed buildings are nineteenth-century clapboard houses, the shutters slumping at the windows. It wasn't easy to tell which buildings had fallen into terminal neglect, which had never been finished, and which had been burned by the rebels. The war accelerated a process that had been going on for a long time. Tens of thousands of refugees had poured into the city, and the narrow potholed roads were clogged with vehicles and pedestrians, including the occasional amputee begging. Outside one shop, a sign announced, “Free Haircut for All Amputees.”

Sierra Leone's misery has attracted more than a hundred and eighty N.G.O.s, and their four-wheel-drive vehicles seemed to be the only new and functioning things in the landscape. Mirones made the rounds of the groups providing prostheses. An American woman named Kim Kargbo sat down with him in the sweltering conference room of World Hope International. She wore a blue denim jumper embroidered with pink flowers, and had a blond ponytail and the brisk manner of a daughter of missionaries. She had grown up here and was meeting a man whose project she had vehemently opposed. She said that she was shocked to see him.

“We're here on the ground pouring our blood, sweat, and tears in a war-recovery situation,” Kargbo said. “You did this as a sort of non-coördinated effort. Those kids were involved in a long-term rehab plan. All of a sudden they're gone, and none of us have even talked to you—that was kind of difficult.”

Mirones explained his original idea of having the kids come back here as models.

“And that certainly has merits,” Kargbo said. “But one problem is the kids are never coming back. So how does that fit in the mix?” The effect he'd had in Sierra Leone, Kargbo said, was to tear apart families, “which is what the war has been about,” and to raise unreasonable hopes among the amputees who were left behind.

Mirones described how he'd tried to deflate the bubble of miraculous expectations among the kids in New York.

“But you can't burst the bubble,” Kargbo told him. “It's too strong.”

“I was glad she came clean with me,” Mirones said on the way out. “Why beat around the bush?”

I asked if he now had any second thoughts.

“No. Look, you've seen what I've seen. She can talk, but I know our people got better care—medical, orthopedic, prosthetic. Look at this guy.” An elderly man was sitting by the security gate with what looked like a boxing glove attached to metal rods that were strapped around his forearm without a socket. “Why should he have to wear a fucking arm like that?”

As we drove around the city, Mirones's mood rose and fell. “One minute I'm thinking, There's nothing I can do, it's out of my hands, and the next I'm thinking, How can we set up some kind of commissary to feed them?” The prosthetics labs were rudimentary by his standards, and they gave him an impression of profound idleness. Everywhere, people were sitting around with nothing to do, dozens of amputees were wearing no prostheses, and none of it made any sense. “That little girl needs a wheelchair,” he muttered as we passed a child, crippled from polio in both legs, lurching along the road without crutches. “Where's the sense of urgency?” he kept asking. “I mean, get the show on the road, get on the phone, make a couple of calls, let's go!” The next minute, he would check himself: “Then again, we don't know all the circumstances, the obstacles.”

The amputee camp on the western end of Freetown is a warren of plastic tents housing about three hundred amputees and twelve hundred relatives. There's a satellite dish by the entrance. Mirones's arrival drew a large group, who passed around my photographs of the children and exclaimed over how much weight they'd gained. As we walked up a dirt road toward the camp's prosthetics lab, a man who was missing a hand shyly approached and said that he wondered if by some chance he would be the next one to be taken away. Mirones wasn't the only foreigner to have removed people from the camp. Groups with names like Feed My Lambs International and Christ End Timer Movement were regularly spiriting away amputees from under the noses of the N.G.O.s that were supposedly providing prosthetics and therapy. Outsiders described the camp as “the national holocaust museum” and “a freak show” that ought to be shut down, but no one seemed prepared to take that step. The camp received attention, money, and consignments of goods that benefitted the government, the N.G.O.s, and the amputees. It attracted visitors like Madeleine Albright, Kofi Annan, and Matthew Mirones. A Dutch physical therapist who had worked in Sierra Leone sixteen years ago told me that he recognized a man in the camp who had lost part of his leg to diabetes long ago and was now presenting himself as an atrocity victim.

Another group, known as the War Wounded, had originally been sheltered with the amputees, but fights kept breaking out between the two groups over donations that were meant for amputees, and the War Wounded were moved to a camp about ten miles outside town. There they showed me deep machete gashes, bullet wounds in the face, and terrible burns. Two women said that they'd been shot in the vagina. A botched amputation had cost a man the use of both hands. But the War Wounded felt ignored by the world and envious of the amputees, who ranked higher on the scale of suffering. A joke was making the rounds in Freetown about how many fingers one would be willing to lose in order to go to America.

A woman and her husband, who was missing one arm and both ears, claimed a family relationship with Memuna, the poster child, but their claim was false. They said that a twelve-year-old rebel had chopped off the little girl's arm, but I discovered that it had been surgically amputated after being infected with fragments from the bullet that had killed her grandmother. One of the children on Staten Island had told me that she'd seen both her parents shot to death; I learned in Africa that her father had died of natural causes and her mother was still alive. The logic of survival, the need to be noticed, drove people to exaggerate already unspeakable horrors. The camp mocked Mirones's vision of self-sufficient amputees. I asked a double amputee who had received prostheses in New York and then been sent back why so few people in the camp wore their arms. “They want to win sympathy,” he said. “In case someone like you comes to the camp.” Amputation had given people an “edge,” to use Corinne Dufka's word. Having lost everything else, the children's families were making what they could of it.

There is no Krio word for “adoption.” In Sierra Leone, the concept doesn't exist. (The only people who used the word “adoption” were the rebels, insisting that they never abducted the boys and girls who became soldiers and servants.) But use of the Krio word men, meaning “to care for,” is extremely widespread, as is the practice: a woman other than the biological parent will bring up a child because the parents can't, or because she is childless, or simply because she likes the child. Unlike adoption, there is no loss of legal rights, and it's expected that upon reaching adulthood the child will help support the biological parents. Of the children on Staten Island, three had been cared for by adults who were not their biological parents, and none lived with both parents. The families in the camp seemed to understand that a similar arrangement had been made for their children in America.

Each child had recorded a tape for her family. Fatu made one for her aging aunt: “I know very well that you're all suffering there. I want you to know I won't forget you. They're teaching us to cook. We go to church on Sunday. For now I can only send pictures. You need to see how happy I am. I've even forgotten that they amputated my hand. I can even write with the hand that was chopped off. That is the biggest thing that has happened to me. So I feel like a normal kid.”

None of the families wanted the children to return. Bintu's aunt, who called herself the mother, said that the night after the girl went away she had a dream so frightening that it woke her up: Bintu was back, hobbling on her crutch. “You didn't go to America?” her aunt cried. “What happened?”

Damba's uncle, who called himself the father, said, “The problem that she had, the amputation, is a blessing in disguise. It was the will of God and the price she had to pay to go to America.”

I tried to explain adoption in terms of the concrete rights that the parents would lose. Damba's mother, painfully thin from tuberculosis, began stroking her lip and then her forehead with her one hand, anxiety filling her eyes. Finally, the uncle, a small man in an embroidered Muslim gown and cap, spoke up. “I can't accept that, we don't do that,” he said. “In our culture, when you get children the point is for us to prosper when she grows up. If you want to help us, men the child. Good. But, if you want to take custody, that's out of the question.”

Mariama's mother said, “I would prefer she lives there and comes to visit once in a while. I will never accept her being adopted, because she's my daughter and we were very close. I can't imagine that. My daughter will never accept it, either.”

One by one, I spoke with each family, and they all said no.

When I thought about it later, it was difficult to know whether their fear was losing the child or losing the benefits. Perhaps one was inextricable from the other. What seemed clear was that the families had already made enough sacrifices. The children on Staten Island were all they had left.

Erik Duret, the French psychologist in Freetown, said of the children's situation, “For me, that's the worst of all—its absolute uprooting.” The war, he said, was above all a story of broken bonds, which could be repaired only within the family, the community, the society. “These people, after the excitement of the beginning, after six months, a year, two years, are going to start asking themselves, 'What's become of my family? What's happening over there? Who am I?' “

I didn't disagree. But it occurred to me that the people who wanted the children sent back to Sierra Leone didn't have to live there. Sierra Leoneans themselves readily grasped the measures that the families had taken and the decision they had made.

One night at the hotel bar, Mirones said, “The easiest piece of the puzzle is the device. Considering all the other insurmountable obstacles they have to contend with, it seems that having an inferior prosthesis just adds to it. It's not brain surgery. It's pretty straightforward.” He set down his Scotch. “Where do I fall on this now? Where do I put my emphasis? What do I advocate? Do I advocate supporting the mechanism that's in place? Come up with a new one? Who's got the time for that? Do I try to improve what they're doing? It's not political, technical, bureaucratic. It's a man-to-man, human-to-human issue. The hard part is to mobilize people to show the same passion they exhibited back home for the people here.”

Mirones looked discouraged and slightly frantic. He had wanted to help people on a larger scale than the Rotarians envisioned, and in Sierra Leone itself; but a destroyed African country wasn't going to lend itself easily to the practical energies of a Brooklyn businessman. He had run up against the limits here: the very qualities that had worked so well back in New York—his single-mindedness, his refusal, as he often said, to “dwell on things” to the extent that action became impossible—left him at a loss about how to proceed in Freetown, among people who needed far more than limbs.

“Imagine not having a pair of hands!” he suddenly exclaimed. “It's part of what separates us from the animal kingdom, it's this beautiful ability to be dextrous and capable with the hands. And you lose that ability . . .” He stared at me, his mouth pulled down, his hands held out before him.

After a week in Africa, Mirones went home. A month later, in his Brooklyn office, he told me that he was eager to return and set up a facility to bring to Sierra Leone the kind of first-rate prosthetic care that the people there deserve. But, as it turned out, that week in Freetown marked the end of his project; the amputees living new lives in America mark the extent of his contribution. They have all received political asylum, and though the families in the camp still have not given written consent for adoption, three of the children are now living with couples around the country, who are seeking legal guardianship, and Joe Mandarino and Nancy Passeri are looking for homes for the others. Last August, Sheku, the orphaned teen-age boy, flew to Montana to meet a ranching couple who were interested in adopting some of the children. On the long drive from Billings to the ranch, he told me later, “It was dark, with mountains. Guess what? It give me the flashback. I remember when the men chop off my hands. I start suffering like I was a little boy. So I didn't like it.” Sheku decided that a ranch in Montana would not be the best place for the children, who, more than two years after coming to the United States, were still living on Staten Island and awaiting new parents.

The man who brought them here no longer makes limbs. Last year, in a special election, Matthew Mirones ran as a Republican for an open seat in the New York State Assembly, and now serves his Staten Island constituents in Albany. ♦